With World Cup fever gripping the region, there is no better time to consider the state of Taiwanese soccer from an expatriate perspective.
With baseball and basketball coverage dominant, soccer has been something of a whipping boy in the sporting community. Most of the whipping seems to come from within soccer's ranks, however. Swiss national Michel Blanc, director of a shipping firm and owner of the Tavern Premier sports bar and restaurant and other venues, is one expatriate who has been stung by the often stupefying sporting environment in this country.
"In Taiwan, you've basically got the problem that there is nothing for football. We've learned it the very painful way, being foreigners wanting to play football, and basically, [they] being very racist, [we] don't want to play with the Chinese ... and they don't want to play with us," says Blanc, who has become the leading sponsor of expatriate soccer in Taiwan.
PHOTO: LIN CHENG-KUN, TAIPEI TIMES
Blanc was referring to the privately funded Businessmen's League (BML), which he and colleague Michael Chandler say suffers from poor administrative assistance, no consultation on how the competition is run and possible bias against foreign sides by referees. All this, and a refusal to admit more foreign teams, forced expat soccer players last year to start their own competition, the Tavern Premier League.
In an interview with the Taipei Times, Blanc later softened his tone toward the Taiwanese administrators and players, indicating that racism may not be the villain. Power cliques and poor organizational skills, perhaps, or something as simple as the lack of communication in a country where English is relatively poorly spoken. But his point is well made. There is a chasm between Taiwan and everyone else: The expatriate soccer community consists of people from all over the world, of all ethnic backgrounds. The Japanese expatriate team, JFC, for example, has also opted to play in the expatriate competition instead of the "local" league.
But access to adequate pitches for this young competition is difficult -- expatriate soccer adminis-trators such as Chandler must personally supervise pitch quality and battle city government bureaucracy simply to get it to do the job it is paid to do: maintain the soccer pitches at Dajia Riverside Park, for example. When they first arrived at their new home, they were stunned to find a tree in the middle of the pitch (it was duly relocated). In recent weeks, without warning, fixed goalposts were moved and damaged by city government personnel to change a road alignment, rendering pitch markings useless.
But the biggest problems start at the top.
With reports of flakiness and poor commitment in the men's national team that would outrage supporters in any other country, and few good results to show from its occasional international fixture, it is unsurprising that soccer is struggling for good press.
Administratively, Taiwanese soccer suffers from a disjuncture between the top soccer body, the Chinese Taipei Football Association (CTFA; endorsed by FIFA, yet titled the "Republic of China Football Association" in Mandarin) and the rest of the game around the country.
This is reflected in the amateurish attempts to promote the Futsal World Championship in Taipei in 2004. When FIFA president Sepp Blatter gave an opening speech for the tournament in front of numerous VIPs, he was upstaged by several locals who could not stop chatting with one another -- much to Blatter's irritation.
But things seem to be changing for the better.
The head of the CTFA since March last year seems more willing to tell it like it is. In his well-wishing letter to last year's expatriate Summer Cup competition, CTFA general secretary Der Chia Lin (
The sense of hope is well-timed. Today the inaugural Fubon Taiwan League is launched, featuring four teams in a five-week competition held in Taipei, Tainan and Kaohsiung.
The women's national team, more competitive than the men, are going to Australia for an international competition. And, as the Taipei Times has been showing in its promotions for the World Cup, there are growing opportunities for local kids who want to play soccer more formally than a kickaround in Da-an Forest Park.
And then, for expatriates, the place to be next weekend is Dajia Riverside Park, where this year's expatriate Summer Cup will feature teams from Taipei, Hsinchu, Kaohsiung, Nantou, Tainan, Taichung and, for the first time, Hualien.
Encouragingly, not only Blanc's Tavern Premier venue, but also Carlsberg and World Cup sponsors Adidas and Coca-Cola have signed on as sponsors for the expat festival. It's a further sign that dedication to soccer, and tenacity and patience in particular, promises a payoff in the long term with a little bit of help from the corporate sector. But how long must soccer fans wait?
A generation, say Blanc and Chandler. Fifteen years before the results of their and others' efforts have an effect at higher levels. And Blanc is characteristically blunt about what has been achieved so far -- and what has the potential to block progress.
"I think those people perform miserably," says Blanc about the CTFA. "There's no love for football -- probably, to kick the ball themselves, yes -- but there is no passion to organize something ... There's no drive in it. It's very poor."
Yet Blanc is optimistic that things will change.
"Football is definitely taking off in Taiwan," Blanc says, adding that the real change seemed to come with the previous World Cup in Japan and South Korea, after which local young people began to wear soccer gear on the street. This, he said, was helped by half-respectable coverage of soccer in the Chinese-language Apple Daily.
"Even in 2002, there wasn't much pre-hype to the World Cup here in Taiwan. This World Cup, you're seeing TV commercials and whatever else," Chandler adds.
Despite all of the negatives and the obstacles, things are indeed changing for the better. The Master Football Academy, an expatriate organization that offers Taiwanese children a soccer training program, is progressing well. Coaches are being trained at their own expense by professionals brought in from England. The CTFA is organizing soccer clinics. And on the politics side, if there is miscommunication, stand-offishness and possibly jealousy by the CTFA toward the not-for-profit passions of expatriate soccer devotees, the association seems to know, perhaps now more than ever, that it must eventually harness the energy of expatriate and foreign soccer knowledge.
"They sort of don't want to let us `in,' but they also don't want to lose contact. They want to see what we do," Blanc says.
That would appear wise. The alternative may be more years of inept press conferences, non-existent promotion work, wasted funds and offended overseas dignitaries.
For more information, see the Chinese Taipei Football Association Web site ctfa.com.tw; Summer Cup contact michael@cargocare.com; and Master Football Academy Web site www.mfa.com.tw/news.htm.
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